Who’s behind the wordpress.org free themes ?

We all know of course that there’s one major guy called Matthew Mullenweg behing the whole WordPress.org ecosystem.

But did you know that the 2621 themes of  the WP.org theme repository (as of today July, 17th 2014)  have all been carrefully reviewed by a very small team of incredibly awesome people ? WordPress experts, they check every single theme submitted to the WordPress.org platform and verify if they are compliant with the guidelines (which is quite a big task to do believe me!). Not only reviewed with the guidelines, but the themes are also tested, commented, improved/corrected if needed.

This is the theme review team.

And those guys are awesome for many reasons : first they make available to the world thousands of free themes, keeping alive the real open-source spirit. They also contribute to help hundreds of thousands of people to publish their content, for free (except for hosting of course) and beautifully.

They work very hard, and they do it for free, as volunteers. But they are all like us : I mean they have a job, maybe a rent to pay and a family to take care of. They work even on the week end! And on top of that, they still find time to answer questions to developers who have subscribed to the very active mailing list.

Today for example, I had a very urgent (and exceptional) update request related to a bug in the Customizr theme. The bug could have potentially impacted many users and it required some php skills to fix it. Less than 30 minutes later, the new version of the theme was reviewed and approved !!  And two hours later, the new release was live on WP.org. Check the ticket here.

To me this team is a very powerful example of what can be done with the open source Web in terms of working community. A group of foxes from all over the planet working together for something they simply love and giving back great value to the rest of the world. This is all working because of the trust they have for each other. I really love this concept/idea.

In fact, this is the implementation of the WordPress philosophy in all its glory! Seeing this team in action day by day, I truly believe that open source can still be a possible future for the web.

Below is the list of those who reviewed the Customizr theme and helped me sometimes, with a link to their websites. (I really hope I forgot nobody 🙂 )

So thanks to :

This is just an extract of the team, there are more reviewers to thank.

Keep up this good work and again, just thanks!

PS : For developers, I strongly recommend the WP.org themes blog.

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